There are still a few weeks to go, but I have to admit that the Decathlon idea was a bit of a failure in the end, presumably because of the decision to go for purely random games. It sounded like a good idea at the time but ended up meaning there were too many games that nobody knew/liked/wanted to play a lot of and very few people have even given it a try. The season's not over, though, so if you're interested check out the other thread - a top 5 spot is very much up for grabs, though you'll have a hard time catching the clear winner - steve5332! A very impressive performance from him.
But I still like the idea and am keen to give it another go. I enjoyed learning some new games, even if a few of them weren't the best, and I think the fix is pretty easy: let's only select popular games this time.
What's a "popular" game? I've defined it as a game that's had more than 500 tables played in the Arena season (either this one or last), with at least 10 people making it to Elite. This gives us a list of 148 games, which is a little over a third of the 380-odd games in Arena. I'm sure they won't all be everyone's favourites, but they're not obscure and you would expect to be able to start Arena games reasonably regularly. This may be somewhat of an over-correction, but better that than another season with hardly any participants. We can always widen it out again in future if this picks up any steam.
Like before, I selected 10 games at random, with some minor tweaking to make sure there was a good balance of short/long games and abstracts/euros/card games, and I'm publishing it early to give people the chance to get to 100 Elo before the season kicks off. This is the list:
To enter, all you have to do is play! At the end of the season, I'll compile the rankings of all the games and come up with a combined ranking like the one above. If you don't want to play all ten, you don't have to; see how many you can achieve before the end of the season. I'll rank you if you can get to 5. Best of luck, and maybe I'll see you at the tables.
Code: Select all
Name Elites Score Guildes 7WD Caravan ToeShamBo Hugo Xidit Insert Quetzal Nippon Palace
steve5332 10 15958 1543 1707 1603 1705 1528 1555 1599 1551 1532 1635
msclark 8 12803 1620 1720 0 1572 1573 1563 1642 1559 0 1554
qwertasdfg 5 7766 0 1527 0 1569 1622 0 1453 0 0 1595
What's a "popular" game? I've defined it as a game that's had more than 500 tables played in the Arena season (either this one or last), with at least 10 people making it to Elite. This gives us a list of 148 games, which is a little over a third of the 380-odd games in Arena. I'm sure they won't all be everyone's favourites, but they're not obscure and you would expect to be able to start Arena games reasonably regularly. This may be somewhat of an over-correction, but better that than another season with hardly any participants. We can always widen it out again in future if this picks up any steam.
Like before, I selected 10 games at random, with some minor tweaking to make sure there was a good balance of short/long games and abstracts/euros/card games, and I'm publishing it early to give people the chance to get to 100 Elo before the season kicks off. This is the list:
To enter, all you have to do is play! At the end of the season, I'll compile the rankings of all the games and come up with a combined ranking like the one above. If you don't want to play all ten, you don't have to; see how many you can achieve before the end of the season. I'll rank you if you can get to 5. Best of luck, and maybe I'll see you at the tables.
